On September 2, 1945, in a grassy field in Hanoi known as Ba Dinh Square, a fifty-five-year-old man wearing a worn khaki tunic and white rubber sandals gave the speech that launched the Vietnam War. The man, who would be long dead when that war finally ended, was Ho Chi Minh, and the speech that he gave was, essentially, the American Declaration of Independence in Vietnamese.

He did not just begin by quoting its most famous words—“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”—his whole speech was copied from the Declaration. Ho enumerated the ways that a colonial power (France) had abused the rights of the Vietnamese, and he ended with another echo of Thomas Jefferson: “The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilize all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.”

It was part of Ho’s intention, when he gave the speech, to solicit the support of the United States in driving the French out of his country. (That plan did not work out so well.) But Ho was also a student of political history, and he knew that he was not the first leader of a national liberation movement to appropriate the Declaration of Independence. In fact, according to the historian David Armitage, Vietnam was something like the fifty-fifth country to do so. The Declaration created, as Armitage puts it, “a new genre.” It provided a template for claims of national sovereignty that, in the years since 1776, has been used by more than a hundred countries, from Flanders (1790) and Haiti (1804) to Bulgaria (1908), Finland (1917), and Ireland (1919) to Abkhazia (1992) and Eritrea (1993).

The Declaration is both an appeal to reason and a justification of force. The appeal to reason rests on the “all men are created equal” part. Today, we read that as a statement about race and gender equality, but that is not what Jefferson meant. He meant that no man is above the law: governors must govern by the consent of the governed. But Jefferson’s language was broader than his intention, and it allowed Frederick Douglass to point out, in his famous Fourth of July oration, in 1852, that, though Americans had declared before the world that all men are created equal, “yet you hold securely in a bondage . . . a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.” In the long run, and thanks in great measure to the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which mandates “equal protection of the laws,” and the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the vote, the equality ideal of the Declaration was incorporated into our Constitutional structure. But what most attracted the the countries that produced their own declarations of independence was the Declaration’s justification of force. When you have diagnosed that a boot is on your neck, Jefferson says, you have the right to throw it off by any means necessary. And that right is God-given.

And so, on December 24, 1860, the state of South Carolina passed a Declaration of Secession, which included ample reference to the Declaration of Independence, and, a little less than four months later, Rebel forces attacked Fort Sumter, a federal installation in Charleston Harbor. The legislators of South Carolina did not believe that all men are created equal. They did believe that their rights were being suppressed (including their right to suppress others) and that they therefore had the right to overthrow their oppressors.

And so, on the principle that what goes around comes around, on May 15, 1967, the Black Panthers published their manifesto, the Ten-Point Program. The tenth and final demand, bearing the title “We Want Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice, and Peace,” consists entirely of a quotation from the Declaration of Independence, ending with the words “When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” The Panthers did believe that all men are created equal. But they also believed that, if push were to come to shove, they, too, had the right to overthrow their oppressors.

Still, it is a valuable feature of our country that we do not mark its birth by a celebrating a triumph of force. On what day did the Revolutionary War begin? When did the British surrender at Yorktown? What date was the Treaty of Paris signed? Unless you make your living teaching American history or playing “Jeopardy,” you probably don’t know the answers to these questions. But you do know when the Declaration of Independence was written.

The Declaration did not create a nation. It created only the idea of a nation, and that idea, as its scope and meaning have evolved over time, is what we annually pay our respects to. All who live here are equal. All who live here have the same rights. None who lives here is above the law. In some years, loyalty to those principles seems like something we can take for granted. This year, on the two hundred and forty-third birthday of our founding document, not so much.

Had Brett Kavanaugh not been accused of sexual assault, one of the first cases he would have heard as a Supreme Court Justice would have been that of Herman Gundy, a convicted sex offender. When nominated, last July, Kavanaugh was expected to be confirmed in time for the term that started last October. But the emergence of sexual assault allegations against him delayed his confirmation vote until October 6th, just after the Court’s first set of oral arguments—which included Gundy’s request to invalidate his federal conviction for failure to register as a sex offender. In June, the Court denied Gundy’s petition. As it turns out, Kavanaugh’s absence from the case likely changed its outcome.

Gundy v. United States was about the “Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act,” known as SORNA, which Congress enacted in 2006. The statute made it a crime, punishable by ten years in prison, for individuals convicted of a sex offense involving a minor to fail to register in each state where they live, work, or study. But Congress gave the Attorney General “the authority to specify the applicability” of these requirements to people convicted before SORNA took effect. In 2007 and in 2011, Attorneys General Alberto Gonzales and Eric Holder said the requirements do apply to such people.

That group encompassed half a million people, including Gundy, who was convicted of sexual assault of a minor in 2005. After serving prison time for the crime, he went to live in a halfway house in New York in 2012. After he failed to register there, he was rearrested and convicted of the new federal crime. Gundy claimed that SORNA violated the non-delegation doctrine, wherein it is unconstitutional for Congress to delegate its legislative power to the executive branch. He argued that letting the Attorney General determine whether the law applied to people like him left too much to be decided by an agency rather than by Congress.

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For the better part of a century, the Court has permitted Congress to delegate broad policymaking authority to federal agencies. The Court has not struck down a statute under the non-delegation doctrine since 1935, when a conservative majority was hostile to progressive New Deal measures aimed at protecting workers and consumers. Since then, the increasing complexity of modern industrialized society has made it obvious that—even when Congress is not as dysfunctional as it is now—it’s not possible for Congress to legislate the technical details necessary to regulate the environment, health, safety, labor, education, energy, elections, discrimination, housing, and the economy.

As a result, executive agencies create regulations and implement binding policies. That has long been understood as both necessary for the country to function and consistent with the Constitution. The Court has applied a test: if a statute gives an agency discretion that is sufficiently constrained by an “intelligible principle,” then Congress is not unconstitutionally delegating legislative power. But many conservatives complain that that test has been applied in a lax way, so that any statute delegating any scope of authority appears to satisfy it. For example, the Court has repeatedly upheld statutes that give agencies only general guidance, such as to regulate in the “public interest,” or issue air quality standards “requisite to protect the public health.”

In Gundy, all four liberal Justices, in a plurality opinion by Justice Elena Kagan, hewed to the prevailing approach, finding that Congress provided enough guidance limiting the agency’s discretion to pass constitutional muster. Three conservative Justices, in a dissent by Justice Neil Gorsuch, said that the law impermissibly gave the Attorney General “free rein to write the rules,” and was unconstitutional. Justice Samuel Alito cast the deciding vote that enabled the liberals to prevail this time, but his three-paragraph concurrence made clear that the victory may be short-lived. He said that if the majority “were willing to reconsider the approach we have taken for the past 84 years, I would support that effort.” A conservative majority was lacking here because of the absence of Justice Kavanaugh. Next time there’s a similar case before the Court, his vote will make for a different result.

We are now explicitly on notice that the Court will likely abandon its longstanding tolerance of Congress delegating broadly to agencies. What’s at stake is the potential upending of the constitutional foundations of the so-called “administrative state.” Today’s reality is that agencies, not Congress, make most federal laws. As Justice Kagan put it, if the delegation in Gundy were unconstitutional, “then most of Government is unconstitutional.”

What will happen then, when the conservative bloc prevails? The alarmist view is that the E.P.A. couldn’t have the power to decide how stringent pollution standards should be. The F.D.A. couldn’t have the authority to approve or deny applications to sell new medical drugs. The Department of Education couldn’t make rules for colleges and universities. The Department of the Interior couldn’t govern snow mobiles in national parks. The S.E.C. couldn’t regulate financial firms or securities. The F.C.C. couldn’t issue rules on net neutrality or Internet service providers. In sum, we would dwell in a world without the federal law that governs our lives.

The reason this parade of horribles is not quite right is that very few of us actually want to live in that world, and what the public, Congress, and the President all want over time, the Court is unlikely to stop. And to say that there are constitutional constraints on the scope and structure of congressional delegation to agencies is not to say that no delegation is allowed at all.

An irony of the conservative majority’s insistence on returning to the Constitution’s requirements is that non-delegation is not mentioned in the Constitution. It is a set of judicially crafted elaborations on the principles of separation of powers and good governance. Article I simply grants all “legislative powers” to Congress, Article II similarly gives the “Executive power” to the President, and the text says nothing about delegation, nor does it define legislative or executive power. The meaning of these terms, of course, has been subject to many pages of argument and judicial interpretation since.

The main idea of the non-delegation doctrine is that any law that is enforced against citizens must be approved by Congress. It’s not enough for Congress to say, “We should have a law on this subject and someone else will write and enforce it.” But this formulation is a rhetorical parlor trick. When building a house, one may have a strong idea of the kind of house one wants, but most of us have neither the knowledge nor the desire to make the thousands of key decisions about how to safely construct it. Those decisions are sensibly delegated to a contractor and an architect. A rule forbidding any delegation of that sort makes for very different, more rudimentary, building, and probably many fewer buildings built.

The more robust non-delegation doctrine that the conservative Justices desire would mean a change in the nature and scope of the federal government’s role in our lives. Conservatives favor making it difficult for the federal government to regulate, because, when it does, it risks impinging on our liberties. And, if the federal government does less, states may do more. The impact of this change will ultimately depend on which elected officials are in power, and that is really up to us, not the Supreme Court.

Calling all hollaback girls and sk8er bois who want to bring the sexy back. You’re invited to my early-two-thousands-themed party! It’s going to be bootylicious.

“Legally Blonde” will be playing on a loop; an iPod shuffle will be blasting the Strokes; and there will be zero discussion about how none of us have a mortgage yet, even though we all know we probably should, because property is a sound investment, especially at our age.

So set your AOL Instant Messenger status to “Away” and come get ur freak on. Let’s all dance like we’re still covered by our parents’ health-insurance plans!

And there goes my shirt up over my head!

That’s right, it’s going to get hot in herre. And I’m not talking about the anthropogenic climate change we weren’t as cognizant of in the early two-thousands, even though scientists had been warning us for decades. I’m talking about body heat generated by us dancing to Nelly, ha ha. (Bonus points if you rock the Band-Aid!)

Of course, I do understand that not all guests will be able to shake it like a Polaroid picture. So, for anyone bringing along their little ones, there’s a quiet room at the back of the apartment with toys to keep them occupied and freshly made beds if they get a lil sleepy. 🙂

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YOU’VE JUST BEEN PUNK’D!

No babies allowed because, as of around mid-2017, I feel a strong urge to weep whenever I see one of my friends’ babies. My therapist says it’s a normal feeling to be having at my age and I shouldn’t be hard on myself. And, luckily, I’m not hard on myself, because I know deep down that it’s the baby’s fault. Also, it’s an early-two-thousands party, and none of us had babies back then!!!

Remember using LimeWire, ha ha?

Did I mention we’ve got punch that may or may not have been spiked? (Shaggy voice: It wasn’t me!) But, unlike at my last party, I’ll make sure it’s not so strong that people start to ugly-cry and scream, “I should have studied law when I had the chance!”

How good were the Dandy Warhols?!

I think this rager will be so epic that by the end of the night we’ll be just like Blink 182, asking, “What’s my age again?” (I myself remain firmly in my twenties until July 9th, at 6:32 A.M. E.D.T.)

Snacks and drinks provided, but B.Y.O. Von Dutch hat and ability to repress small talk about how you’re thinking of going freelance but not sure whether you have a strong enough client base. And plus-ones allowed, as long as they don’t tell me it’s worth moving to the suburbs because you really get so much more for your money out there.

C u soon!!! (Ha ha, remember when we all used to text like that and didn’t have mindfulness apps on our phones?)

Talent is like obscenity: you know it when you see it. It’s something that can’t be defined, only recognized—an irreducible and unteachable entity, like charisma or humor, and its confirmation all the more coveted for being so. In his fundamental study, “The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing,” Mark McGurl detailed how, in postwar America, anointing and cultivating literary talent became the purview of creative-writing programs and how, in turn, certain modes of writing came to be privileged above others. With this professionalization—indeed, institutionalization—of a nation’s art form, three injunctions popularized by the M.F.A. became holy writ. Write what you know; show, don’t tell; find your voice. Of this trinity, only the second speaks explicitly to craft and seems readily practicable. It’s the first and last dicta, however, that have proved the most influential, not through their utility but through their confounding simplicity. The question isn’t whether you should cultivate knowledge or voice. The question instead is a screamed “Yes, but how?”

When we identify talent, we say that we’ve found “the real deal,” a flimsy idiom for a solid belief—that, although talent as an entity may be undefinable, it’s still provable. It’s on this putative objectivity, in all its insidious allure, that M.F.A. programs are predicated, offering themselves as arbiters of talent who are able to alchemize literary promise into achievement. Many have found these claims at once irresistible and dubious. One year after graduating from the University of Arizona’s creative-writing program, David Foster Wallace wrote, “The only thing a Master of Fine Arts degree actually qualifies one to do, is teach . . . Fine Arts.” Wallace’s essay, “The Fictional Future” was one of several collected, in 2014, in “MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction,” a book that reanimated and enshrined questions both existential (Can writing be taught?) and practical (How does a writer pay rent?). The bathos of the latter tends to casts an absurd light on the former.

So it is that two new satirical novels set in creative-writing programs, Lucy Ives’s
“Loudermilk: Or, the Real Poet; or, the Origin of the World” and Mona Awad’s “Bunny,” engage with the chimera of “the real deal.” They are set, respectively, in a version of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a version of Brown University and are authored by graduates of those institutions. These books constitute a kind of institutional critique, to borrow a term from the art world, or an institutional autofiction, to adapt an existing literary term. On the one hand, the satirical tone of these novels tips us off that the institutions being portrayed are fundamentally defective. And yet the pages in our hands are tangible counterfactuals! Because isn’t the published novel—the material proof every candidate longs for—evidence of these institutions’ success? Here is the M.F.A. program becoming self-conscious, displaying both impatience with and anxiety over the criterion of authenticity.

The centerpiece of the program is the workshop, or rather, excuse me, the Workshop; in David O. Dowling’s recently published history of America’s most famous creative-writing program, “A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” the word is reverentially capitalized. For anyone unfamiliar with insular world of the M.F.A., the term might conjure scenes of elvin ingenuity—merry workers laboring at their craft. Instead, this mainstay of the creative-writing program has more often been understood as a process of destruction, of tough love that tears you down to build you up. Dowling writes admiringly about the “volatile cocktail of ego and competition”—the “blood sport” of peers ripping each other’s work to shreds—that pervaded the Iowa workshop in the decades after its founding, in 1936.

His book opens with the boozing, brawling John Berryman—he of the “blow-torch approach” to teaching—receiving a punch from a student. Lucy Ives’s
' funny, cerebral “Loudermilk,” which takes its epigraph (“Rilke was a jerk”) from Berryman himself, lampoons this kind of masculine swagger. Its prime object of satire, however, is the very bedrock of the workshop’s pedagogy, the identification of artistic achievement. The novel’s titular handsome idiot, Troy Augustus Loudermilk, is a fraud in the most incontrovertible sense; it’s only by passing off the poems of his nebbishy friend Harry Rego as his own that he’s gained entry to the prestigious Seminars for Writing. These plagiarized poems go down well, but what Loudermilk is truly rewarded for is not his artistic achievement on the page but his charismatic performance in the workshop, including cracking jokes and insulting his professor’s sexual prowess. When you’re a fraud and don’t care, you have nothing to lose.

It’s not just the students who don’t care: Loudermilk’s professors include the dyspeptic (and, in his belligerence and drunkenness, rather Berryman-esque) Don Hillary, who welcomes his young poets with a showily profane speech, assuring them that he does not give “one donkey fuck what you do while you’re here.” One student, Clare, overhearing this speech as she walks by his classroom, wonders, “Could one imagine that his pronouncements herald a really excellent form of meritocracy, somehow? That his is, paradoxically, the most sublime of metrics—since incomprehensible, profane, and therefore absolute?” In a field where the “metrics” are so hard to define, much less achieve, you can stop caring at all—like Loudermilk and Hillary—or, like Harry, you can care too much.

As Harry, whom we understand to be a “real” talent, becomes more invested in his poems, he writes himself a long list of questions that include “Am I the one who is writing these words?” and “Who is the one who is writing?” Eventually, he concludes that “the only way to get to the poem is to drop into a perfectly Harry-shaped shadow.” In other words, he must vacate himself to find himself, must fake himself into authenticity. We sense that his private litany of questions, though painful, are far more conducive to his literary growth than the public jousting of the workshop.

Ives’s hyperbolic satire—her outsized, loquacious characters, her stylistic brio—lays bare the central fallacy of “write what you know.” In one sense, we believe Ives is drawing from her own, all-too-real experience. And yet, with its ludic meta-fictionality and the self-conscious construction of characters, the novel cleverly dodges knowable reality, circumventing the question of authenticity altogether.

In “Bunny,” a work of toothsome and fanged intelligence, the agons of ego and machismo are replaced by the sly and saccharine maneuvers of a femme-y clique who call themselves “Bunnies.” Our narrator, the studiedly uneffusive Samantha, joins these women in the first all-female fiction cohort at the prestigious Warren College. “Workshop is an integral part of the Process,” pontificates Ursula, a professor whose self-regard is sustained by the idolatry of her students. (Here, the capitalization of the word “workshop” is scathing.) “Workshop never ‘confuses us,’ rather it opens us up, helps us grow, leads us in new and difficult and exciting directions. My Workshop in particular, I think you’ll find.”

My Workshop: the proprietorial claim is key. The tenor of the workshop proceeds from the leader, which is to say, the particularities and prejudices of one person—one ego. At some point taste, like talent, becomes an irreducible entity. The Bunnies engage in frothy pieties and hyperbolic niceties, telling each other things like, “Can I just say I loved living in your lines and that’s where I want to live now forever?” Within a rhetoric of universal approbation, every writer turns craven; all talent withers.

Though Awad plays knowingly with the tropes of eighties movies (the book’s hot-pink jacket copy mentions the cult classic “Heathers”; like Winona Ryder in that movie, Samantha has an air of quiet mutiny), we recognize these Bunnies as the apotheosis of that most contemporary archetype, the basic bitch. They love froyo from Pinkberry. They binge-watch “The Bachelorette.” Their Instagram captions are littered with the self-evidently false hashtag #amwriting. “Basic” in this sense is a synonym of sorts for “inauthentic”; we recognize the type, or at least we think we do. These Bunnies, so very bloodless seeming, are in fact quite bloodthirsty. Because, in addition to writing fiction, they’re engaged in an extracurricular workshop of their own devising, where, unlike in the simpering diplomacy of the classroom, their creativity is literally visceral. They conjure dream boys, real flesh-and-blood creations that they call “drafts,” “hybrids,” “darlings,” from rabbits. Unfortunately, these characters can get unruly, and the girls keep an axe close at hand. “Sometimes you have to kill your darlings, you know?” coos one Bunny. Just as Ives has constructed a postmodern playhouse to deflate the notion of authenticity, Awad has winkingly deployed the great ruse of the supernatural.

Are these Bunnies for real? The answer to this question is a twofold no. They are false in their friendships, and, worse, they have no true talent. Even in their own workshop, they never quite manage to pull things off. Their “darlings” always fall just a bit short of the intended reality, lacking fully operational hands or penises. In other words, the Bunnies fail both literally, within their necromancy, and metaphorically, within their writing, to bring their characters to life.

Like rabbits, bad writers are everywhere, bred by M.F.A. programs across the country, turning out banal, interchangeable stories. When Samantha finally conjures her own piece of literature, it’s from a lone and noble creature—a stag. Her creation, Max, is the workshop’s first fully functioning boy. In the wickedly hilarious climax of the novel, the Bunnies show up to their last class bruised, bleeding, and ready, finally, to get real. With sweet feminist irony, it’s this dream boy made flesh who finally liberates them from that feminine yoke, extreme faux niceness. One classmate passes a simple and supremely unsayable verdict of another’s work: “I hated it.”

Max, Samantha’s triumph of extracurricular creativity, is also the agent of institutional destruction. In true Frankensteinien fashion, the proof of the author’s brilliance is her character’s apparent autonomy. No one proves this more starkly than Ava—Samantha’s lodestar and world center, her beloved best friend, whose contempt for the Bunnies (“that little-girl cult”) and Warren is spectacular. She is the one character who seems to radiate pure, unassailable selfhood—tango-dancing, white-haired Ava, to whom Max says, rapturously, “being with you is like being in literature.” It turns out that Ava really is too good to be true; she, like Max and the other bloody boys, is a fictional invention come to life. How is it, then, that she feels more real than anyone else, both to the reader and to Samantha, her unwitting “author”? The question is unanswerable, or, rather, the answer is that unanswerable thing, talent realized. For Samantha, it’s the possibility of companionship with her characters (no less real for being, technically, fictional), not the praise or censure of peers or professors, that galvanizes her to write more, and to write better.

In the final chapters of “Loudermilk,” a “poetry showdown” finally reveals Loudermilk as a fraud and his proxy as the real poet. But, as with an unshameable wind sock of a politician whose lies and blunders do nothing to unseat them, this is by no means Loudermilk’s undoing. Workshop, which we understand to be a sort of microcosm for what Ives later denounces as the “banal hypocrisy” of institutional American life at large, has worked well for Loudermilk. He skips town for New York and gets an agent. Of course he does. “I feel like I couldn’t even have planned this, like how amazing things worked out,” he writes in an e-mail to Harry. “But, hey when you’ve got extreme talent haha ;).” He does not, however, have the last word. At the end of the novel, his author seeks to make explicit her intent in a startling afterword:

This confounding, fourth-wall breaking address is a spectacularly brazen announcement of inauthenticity. Ives seems to be reminding us that she has fabricated Loudermilk, just as he has fabricated himself. Our “hollow hero” is a fiction who knows himself to be a fiction. Might authenticity itself be an equally fragile myth?

Master’s degrees, agents, and advances can make a difference: talent thrives on recognition, and bills need to be paid. There is, however, no great and infallible arbiter of literary merit. The longing to be anointed, once and for all, as “the real deal” is a fundamentally hopeless desire. Moreover, such longing for external approbation might be the very thing stymieing a young writer from becoming what they need to be, since, as Harry and Samantha realize, both “knowledge” and “voice” can only be discovered for oneself, not bestowed from beyond. What is required is a sort of faith in uncertainty—an acceptance that one’s capacity to conjure authentic new realities will have to be tested again and again, that the writer must be in a constant state of becoming. (In this sense, Harry’s self-interrogation, born of self-doubt, is essential, if exhausting.) And, since thinking must precede (good) writing, it follows that a question might be a more generative tool for a writer than an injunction. Kant famously posed a heuristic in three questions. The first serves as a useful counterpart to the M.F.A.’s first dictum. Not “Write what you know” but, with its honest combination of curiosity and humility, “What can I know?”

“The Star-Spangled Banner” has long been a focal point of political protest and recrimination. The National Football League shunned the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick after he took a knee during the singing of the national anthem at games. At the 1968 Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos responded to the anthem by raising gloved fists in a Black Power salute. During the Vietnam War, Jimi Hendrix twisted the tune into a dissonant wail. Yet nothing in the tangled history of “The Star-Spangled Banner” quite compares to a 1917 incident involving Karl Muck, the music director of the Boston Symphony. As Melissa D. Burrage relates in her new book, “The Karl Muck Scandal: Classical Music and Xenophobia in World War I America,” a brouhaha over the anthem led to the public shaming and eventual arrest of one of the world’s leading conductors.

Muck, an elegant figure with a coolly disciplined podium style, had arrived in Boston in 1906, having long led the Berlin Court Opera. He was a mainstay of the Bayreuth Festival, presiding over summertime performances of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” His exalted status in German music matched prevalent tastes in Boston, a city with a considerable German-speaking community. But the atmosphere changed markedly after the United States declared war on Germany, in April, 1917. In October of that year, Muck and the Boston Symphony gave a concert in Providence, Rhode Island. Patriotic demonstrations at concerts had become routine, and Henry Lee Higginson, the patrician founder and chief executive of the Boston Symphony, was asked to include “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the program. For various reasons, Higginson declined to do so. An arrangement of the anthem was not immediately available, and Higginson felt that patriotic tunes had “no place in an art concert.”

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The blame fell squarely on Muck, whose attachment to Kaiser Wilhelm II and the German Empire was well known. John Rathom, the editor of the Providence Journal, concocted a story that Muck had refused to play the anthem. (In fact, the conductor knew nothing of the request until after the concert, although he later echoed Higginson’s snobbish stance.) Rathom had made his name printing sensational and often fictitious tales of German espionage in the United States. Once the war began, such paranoid chatter was encouraged by George Creel’s Committee on Public Information, which whipped up a nationwide wave of anti-German hysteria. Rathom followed up his bogus Muck story with absurd accusations that the conductor was engaged in subversive activity.

Burrage describes an incendiary public meeting that took place in Baltimore, Maryland, in advance of a Muck concert that was scheduled for early November. Edwin Warfield, the former governor of Maryland, gave a speech saying that the conductor belonged in an internment camp; that he should not be allowed to insult the city where “The Star-Spangled Banner” was written; that “mob violence would prevent it, if necessary”; and that he would lead the mob himself. A crowd of two thousand applauded wildly and shouted comments to the effect that “Muck should have been shot” and “A wooden box would be a better place.” There was a chant of “Kill Muck! Kill Muck!” Such threats were not idle. In April, 1918, the citizens of Collinsville, Illinois, forced a German-American coal miner to sing the anthem walking naked across broken glass. They then lynched him. Not surprisingly, Muck’s Baltimore concert was cancelled.

Most of this has been reported in previous accounts of the Muck affair, but Burrage adds a new wrinkle in detailing the bizarre role played by Lucie Jay, a member of the executive board of the New York Philharmonic. The Boston Symphony was widely considered to be America’s preëminent orchestra, and the Philharmonic hoped to equal or surpass its Northern rival. Burrage shows that Jay made it her mission to bring down Muck, and that as early as 1915 she was agitating against Muck’s proposed pro-German activity. She actually travelled to Boston in that year to demand that the orchestra stop playing German music, even though no such measure was deemed necessary for the Philharmonic. Whether she had anything to do with Rathom’s “Star-Spangled Banner” crusade is unclear, but she certainly capitalized on the outrage.

Matters came to a head in March, 1918, when the Boston Symphony gave several concerts at Carnegie Hall. Jay had tried mightily to prevent the concerts from happening. All manner of wild allegations circulated: that Muck had plotted to blow up munitions depots; that he had sabotaged American guns; that he had dispatched prostitutes to military bases to infect soldiers with venereal diseases; that he had radioed messages to U-boats from his vacation home in Seal Harbor, Maine. The conductor had been considered immune from an enemy-aliens arrest because he held Swiss citizenship. Jay and her allies proceeded to cast doubt on that claim, to the point that Higginson felt compelled to carry Muck’s citizenship papers onto the Carnegie stage and wave them at the audience.

A few days after the Carnegie appearances, Muck was arrested, in the middle of a rehearsal of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, in Boston. The Massachusetts attorney general and the Bureau of Investigation had discovered that Muck was having an affair with a young mezzo-soprano named Rosamond Young. That relationship allowed investigators to paint Muck as both subversive and immoral—a one-two punch of xenophobia and puritanism. Muck’s home was raided and his assets were seized. Police pored over his score of the St. Matthew Passion, believing that its markings contained a secret code. Anti-American remarks in the letters with Young were deemed sufficient evidence of sedition. Muck spent the remainder of the war in an internment camps, where he conducted the camp orchestras. In a later interview with H. L. Mencken, Muck claimed that on one hot day he and his musicians performed Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony in the nude.

Burrage’s book is commendably even-handed in its treatment of Muck, declining to make an innocent victim out of him. The conductor was fiercely anti-Semitic, and when he returned to Germany, in the early nineteen-twenties, he swung to the ultra-nationalist right, becoming an admirer of Hitler. Higginson, for his part, was prejudiced against Jews and supported measures to restrict immigration. Jay, on the other hand, campaigned against punitive immigration laws, not least because they were contrary to shipping and railroad interests in which she was invested. Muck’s relationships with young women were exploitative, although Burrage points out that he was one of very few male musicians of the period who supported female aspirations toward conducting and composing. One of his protégées, Antonia Brico, conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in 1930—the first woman to do so.

The Muck scandal had significant consequences for musical culture in the United States. In 1914, classical music held an exalted position in American life, appealing not only to élite audiences but also to a broad public. The Muck affair helped to brand the European tradition as suspect and unpatriotic. The historian E. Douglas Bomberger, in his book “Making Music American: 1917 and the Transformation of Culture,” argues that homegrown musical traditions, both classical and popular, benefitted from the wartime demonization of German music and musicians. The year 1917 saw the rapid rise of jazz, which had impeccable credentials as a hundred-percent-American enterprise. Bomberger writes, “The challenge to traditional musical authority may be seen as a symbol of the American military challenge to traditional European authority.” Jazz’s nationalist allure helps to explain why it became so popular in a white population that was otherwise pervaded by racism.

Bomberger’s book leaves one with the uneasy feeling that the First World War encouraged the rise of an American musical chauvinism, one that restricted the polyglot makeup of the nation’s culture at the turn of the last century. Governor Warfield, at the rabid anti-Muck rally in Baltimore, put this nativist attitude most succinctly: “The day is coming when ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ will be sung by every free nation on the globe, and the people will jump to their feet when they hear it, just as you have jumped to your feet today.”

When you ask experts how bots influence politics—that is, what specifically these bits of computer code that purport to be human can accomplish during an election—they will give you a list: bots can smear the opposition through personal attacks; they can exaggerate voters’ fears and anger by repeating short simple slogans; they can overstate popularity; they can derail conversations and draw attention to symbolic and ultimately meaningless ideas; they can spread false narratives. In other words, they are an especially useful tool, considering how politics is played today.

On July 1st, California became the first state in the nation to try to reduce the power of bots by requiring that they reveal their “artificial identity” when they are used to sell a product or influence a voter. Violators could face fines under state statutes related to unfair competition. Just as pharmaceutical companies must disclose that the happy people who say a new drug has miraculously improved their lives are paid actors, bots in California—or rather, the people who deploy them—will have to level with their audience.

“It’s literally taking these high-end technological concepts and bringing them home to basic common-law principles,” Robert Hertzberg, a California state senator who is the author of the bot-disclosure law, told me. “You can’t defraud people. You can’t lie. You can’t cheat them economically. You can’t cheat ’em in elections. ”

California’s bot-disclosure law is more than a run-of-the-mill anti-fraud rule. By attempting to regulate a technology that thrives on social networks, the state will be testing society’s resolve to get our (virtual) house in order after more than two decades of a runaway Internet. We are in new terrain, where the microtargeting of audiences on social networks, the perception of false news stories as genuine, and the bot-led amplification of some voices and drowning-out of others have combined to create angry, ill-informed online communities that are suspicious of one another and of the government.

Regulating bots should be low-hanging fruit when it comes to improving the Internet. The California law doesn’t even ban them outright but, rather, insists that they identify themselves in a manner that is “clear, conspicuous, and reasonably designed.”

But the path from bill to law was hardly easy. Initial versions of the legislation were far more sweeping: large platforms would have been required to take down bots that didn’t reveal themselves, and all bots were covered, not just explicitly political or commercial ones. The trade group the Internet Association and the digital-rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, among others, mobilized quickly in opposition, and those provisions were dropped from the draft bill.

Opposition to the bot bill came both from the large social-network platforms that profit from an unregulated public square and from adherents to the familiar libertarian ideology of Silicon Valley, which sees the Internet as a reservoir of unfettered individual freedom. Together, they try to block government encroachment. As John Perry Barlow, an early cyberlibertarian and a founder of E.F.F., said to the “Governments of the Industrial World” in his 1996 “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace”: “You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.”

The point where economic self-interest stops and libertarian ideology begins can be hard to identify. Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook, speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week, appealed to personal freedom to defend his platform’s decision to allow the microtargeting of false, incendiary information. “I do not think we want to go so far towards saying that a private company prevents you from saying something that it thinks is factually incorrect,” he said. “That to me just feels like it’s too far and goes away from the tradition of free expression.”

In Aspen, Zuckerberg was responding to a question about why his platform declined to take down an altered video that was meant to fool viewers into thinking that Nancy Pelosi was slurring her speech. In an interview last year with Recode, he tried to explain why Facebook allows Holocaust deniers to spread false conspiracy theories.

To be clear, Facebook isn’t the government (yet). As a private company, it can and does take down speech it doesn’t like—nude pictures, for example. What Zuckerberg was describing was the kind of political speech he believes the government should protect and the policy he wants Facebook to follow.

The first bots, short for chatbots, couldn’t hide their artificiality. When they were invented, back in the nineteen-sixties, they weren’t capable of manipulating their users. Most bot creators worked in university labs and didn’t conjure these programs to exploit the public. Today’s bots have been designed to achieve specific goals by appearing human and blending into the cacophony of online voices. Many have been commercialized or politicized.

In the 2016 Presidential campaign, bots were created to support both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but pro-Trump bots outnumbered pro-Clinton ones five to one, by one estimate, and many were dispatched by Russian intermediaries. Twitter told a Senate committee that, in the run-up to the 2016 election, fifty thousand bots that it concluded had Russian ties retweeted Trump’s tweets nearly half a million times, which represented 4.25 per cent of all his retweets, roughly ten times the level of Russian bot retweets supporting Clinton.

Bots also gave Trump victories in quick online polls asking who had won a Presidential debate; they disrupted discussions of Trump’s misdeeds or crude statements; and they relentlessly pushed dubious policy proposals through hashtags like #draintheswamp.

They have also aided Trump during his Presidency. Suspected bots created by unidentified users drove an estimated forty to sixty per cent of the Twitter discussion of a “caravan” of Central American migrants headed to the U.S., which was pushed by the President and his supporters prior to the 2018 midterm elections. Trump himself has retweeted accounts that praise him and his Presidency, and which appear to be bots. And last week a suspected bot network was discovered to be smearing Senator Kamala Harris, of California, with a form of “birtherism” after her strong showing in the first round of Democratic-primary debates.

The problem with attempts to regulate bots, the E.F.F. and other critics argue, is that many of us see them only as a destructive tool. They contend that bots are a new medium of self-expression that is in danger of being silenced. In a letter to the California Assembly, the organization argued that the bot-labelling bill was overly broad and “would silence or diminish the very voices it hopes to protect.” The codes behind the bots are produced by people, they note, and the government should have to meet the toughest standards if it attempts to regulate their speech in any way.

Bots certainly can be beneficial. There are bots created by artists that find interesting patterns in society; bots that inform us about history; bots that ask searching questions about the relationship between people and machines by pretending to be human. “Just because a statement is ultimately ‘made’ by a robot does not mean that it is not the product of human creation,” Madeline Lamo, then a fellow at the University of Washington Tech Policy Lab, and Ryan Calo, a University of Washington law professor, wrote in “Regulating Bot Speech,” a recent article for the UCLA Law Review, which questions the California law.

Jamie Lee Williams, a lawyer at E.F.F. who analyzed the bot law, called the original measure a perilous reduction in free-speech rights. “What scares me a lot,” she said, “is this idea that First Amendment protections are too great and we should whittle it back and relax our standards and allow more government restrictions on speech—giving the government the power to police speech is a dangerous thing.”

In the end, E.F.F. was pleased enough by the changes to the bill to move from opposition to neutrality. Neutrality was as far as the organization would go, Williams commented. “I don’t think E.F.F. would ever come out in support of rules like this,” she said. “There are a lot of good bots.”

Hertzberg, the state senator who authored the legislation, told me that he was glad that the changes to the bill before passage were related to the implementation of the law, rather than to its central purpose of requiring that bots reveal themselves to the public when used politically or commercially. A lawyer by training, Hertzberg said that he resented the accusation that he didn’t care about First Amendment concerns. “There is no effort in this bill to have a chilling effect on speech—zero,” he said. “The argument you go back to is, Do bots have free speech? People have free speech. Bots are not people.”